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Tag: Youth Ministry

Friday before Proper 8: Psalm 77:11-20 Reading: Psalm 77:11-20 Good Times There’s a Wilco lyric that asks and answers, “How do you fight loneliness? Smile all the time.” I’m a big fan of Jeff Tweedy and Wilco. A lot of their music resonates with my inner struggles at times. There’s

Thursday before Proper 8: Psalm 77:1-2 Reading: Psalm 77:1-2 Lament I wake up like this a lot. When I first realized I was dealing with depression in my life, I discovered that for years I’d been falling asleep to deeply troubling thoughts and visions. Now a few years into treatment,

Wednesday before Proper 8: Luke 9:37-43 Reading: Luke 9:37-43 Exorcism I had a friend that had a demon cast out of him once. It wasn’t on purpose. He didn’t even have a demon. He just got himself into a situation where the only way out was to let somebody do

Tuesday before Proper 8: Ephesians 2:11-22 Reading: Ephesians 2:11-22 Temple The phrase, “the dividing wall of hostility” leaps out at me. Sometimes I think the dividing wall is the only thing keeping us together. Facebook is an untenable disaster. Initially it had a curious excitement about it—suddenly, everyone that had

Monday before Proper 8: Psalm 59 Reading: Psalm 59 My Enemies Deliver me. It’s different than asking for victory, isn’t it? There are plenty of other places in the Psalms where the author asks for all manner of holy hell to befall enemies, but here the tone is different. Protect

Proper 7: 1 Kings 19:1-15a Reading: 1 Kings 19:1-15a Getting Well She may have been evil and all, but you’ve got to admit it: Jezebel had style. Upon learning of the genuinely horrific end of the 500 prophets of Baal at the command of Elijah, she doesn’t bat an

Saturday before Proper 7: Psalm 42 Reading: Psalm 42 Deep to Deep To be honest, I’m more likely to run into God outside than most anywhere inside. Don’t get me wrong; I love me a sanctuary. But over time I’ve realized that what I love most about a sanctuary is

Friday before Proper 7: Galatians 3:15-22 Reading: Galatians 3:15-22 The Will of God For a moment, it sounds like Paul is suggesting that God had a legal document drawn up naming Abraham’s offspring the sole inheritor in the event of God’s death. Not quite. The word will here just means

Thursday before Proper 7: Romans 2:17-29 Reading: Romans 2:17-29 Breaking the Law I always thought that Paul was overstating his point here, but I finally figured it out. When I first read it, I thought he was doing some baby + bathwater math, suggesting that if you were going to

Wednesday before Proper 7: Malachi 3:5-12 Reading: Malachi 3:5-12 Robbing God Oh yay, a tithing sermon. Said no one, ever. I knew a pastor that used to joke that announcing a “giving series” was as good as telling everyone to take the next 4-6 weeks off from church. My wife

Tuesday before Proper 7: Galatians 3:10-14 Reading: Galatians 3:10-14 A Lynched God Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree. I’ve heard some interesting debate on whether Christ was crucified on a t-shaped cross with either a high or low crossbar, or—much in the style of a lynching—simply hung in

Proper 6: Luke 7:36-8:3 Reading: Luke 7:36-8:3 Forgiven I’ve written for a number of denominational confirmation resources, but the exercise of the thing on the ground in the local church always managed to feel awkward at some point. Something about the whole thing ultimately coming down to individual conversations about